SNAP
Statement

Statement by David Clohessy of
St. Louis,National Director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by
Priests, a support group.

"Monsignor Kevin Vann, the new co-adjutor of Ft. Worth, comes from
a diocese with a very troubled and troubling track record regarding sexual
abuse cover ups.

As a canon lawyer, he defended Chicago's Father John Calicott, who faces
multiple abuse allegations and lawsuits, and was twice removed because
of molestation charges. We're worried that a cleric who defended an abusive
priest on a technicality would receive a promotion like this.

We've not seen any evidence that Vann has the courageous leadership that's
needed to make the church safer for innocent children and vulnerable adults."

As the disgraced leader of a South Side Catholic parish left town recovering
from a heart condition and a public row with Cardinal Francis George,
national church abuse investigators said they would look into the priest's
apparent defiance of George over the last year.

Banned from living in his parish since 2002, Rev. John Calicott has frequently
slept there, nevertheless.

Calicott has drawn increasing attention and irritation among advocates
for priests' rights and for victims' rights, as well as the U.S. Catholic
Church's apparatus for addressing sexual abuse.

Few cases illustrate certain challenges faced by the Catholic Church
as much as Calicott's.

Removed and reinstated under one set of rules in the mid-1990s, he was
suspended again after the bishops' Dallas convention in 2002. His case
is now under appeal in Rome, and his parish, Holy Angels Church on Chicago's
South Side, is in turmoil.

Beyond the continuing questions of sexual abuse and how to handle it,
dealing with Calicott, a popular black pastor in one of the few thriving
black parishes in Chicago, has exposed issues that lately have dogged
the church in America and the Chicago archdiocese in particular:

How to reach out to African-Americans? And how to preach forgiveness
under a strict new policy of zero tolerance for abusers?

Complicating those notions is the convoluted history of how Calicott's
case has been handled in Chicago.

"It's being looked at because it represents something of what has
been happening in other cases as well," said Rev. Robert Silva, president
of the National Federation of Priests' Councils. "It demonstrates
the whole confused way that the policy is being carried out and the confusing
problems it has for the priest, for the community, and everyone."

But the case has grown more complicated in recent weeks.

"Cardinal George told him he could not be there in ministry. And
he's there. Sleeps there a couple times a week. Speaks to children. Is
there every Sunday at mass. That's in clear violation of the charter.
Does the cardinal know about it? Who's enforcing this here? Where's the
enforcement?" said Illinois Appellate Judge Anne M. Burke, interim
chairwoman of the National Review Board of lay people monitoring the response
of Catholic bishops to the crisis.

"This is one that certainly needs to be sorted out," said Sheila
Horan, deputy director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Office
of Child and Youth Protection. "It is my intention to call the diocese
and inquire as to the details."

Calicott, George agree

In a relationship that has sometimes been adversarial, sometimes supportive,
Calicott and George have taken similar stances on abuse issues. They both
called for leniency and forgiveness after Catholic bishops in Dallas in
2002 demanded the blanket removal of priests found to have committed sexual
abuse.

But they have been at odds over how to carry on while the Vatican decides
how to sort out the few priests who will perhaps be allowed to remain
in ministry.

Meanwhile, parishioners at Holy Angels have rallied around Calicott,
and in the 19 months since George ordered Calicott to leave Holy Angels
until his appeal could be concluded, Calicott has spent up to three nights
a week in the church rectory.

The quiet standoff exploded last month when it was revealed Calicott,
forbidden to preach or wear clerical garb, had last December addressed
pupils at Holy Angels' parochial school.

A beloved pastor at a church where 500 families worship, Calicott has
built on the work of Holy Angels' former leader, the charismatic Rev.
George Clements. The school is among the largest in Chicago, and the parish
has instilled a sense of pride in the impoverished Kenwood-Oakland neighborhood.

"We only have something in the neighborhood of 250 African-American
priests in a country with a long history of racism and a church which
historically has difficulty reaching African-Americans," said Rev.
Raymond Kemp, senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown
University.

"You've got a couple hundred people saying we want our pastor back,
and those couple hundred people happen to be black in a predominantly
white church, and the people who are rallying are not looking around and
seeing a lot of Father Calicotts waiting to take his place," Kemp
said.

Victims groups fear the fervor at Holy Angels will have a chilling effect
on reporting by other sexual-abuse victims at the parish.

"One of the really untold stories behind this is how hurtful--unintentionally
to be sure--these kinds of parishioners can be," said David Clohessy,
national director of the Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests.
"If you genuinely are Christians, you will pray for Father Calicott
and mail him cookies, but you will express your concerns privately, not
publicly, and make a climate conducive for victims to come forward."

The fact that Calicott was a charismatic black pastor in one of the few
predominantly black churches in the archdiocese of Chicago is part of
the reason his cause has been championed so loudly, said Chicago Auxiliary
Bishop Joseph Perry, who oversees the vicariate that includes Holy Angels.

"No other community has placed trust in an offending priest as Holy
Angels has done," he said.

But in the backs of the minds of many at Holy Angels and elsewhere is
the ambiguity surrounding the charges against Calicott in the first place.
The case is complicated and unclear, and unlike many similar abuse cases,
there is no corresponding criminal investigation or civil suit. The accusers
have been quiet since the charges in 1994.

"The facts of the case are so elusive," Perry said. "That's
hard to deal with."

The alleged abuse of two 15-year-old boys occurred in 1976, while Calicott
was an associate pastor at St. Albius Church, said James Dwyer, a spokesman
for the Chicago archdiocese.

Under sexual-abuse standards the archdiocese followed when the charges
were made in the 1990s, then-Cardinal Joseph Bernardin allowed Calicott
to return to Holy Angels as long as parishioners knew of his past and
he posed no further risk to children, said former archdiocesan chancellor
and current Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Paprocki.

Before that determination was made, Calicott spent six months in therapy
at St. Luke Institute in Silver Spring, Md., followed by independent reviews
by two other sexual-abuse experts in the Chicago area, Calicott said.
He was ordered to live with a church monitor and to have only supervised
contact with children. He also had to admit he had committed sexual abuse,
said Paprocki.

"When he was returned to the parish, he signed a covenant, and there
was never any dispute or question but that some sexual misconduct was
engaged in," Paprocki said. "It was definitely a sexual act."

Publicly, Calicott has denied that was the case but accepted responsibility
for mishandling a vaguely described "process of trying to deal with
a situation."

"I denied doing what the boy said, presuming what was read to me
[by the archdiocese] was what the boy said I did," Calicott said
in a phone interview. "Two days after this thing broke, one of the
young men who made the allegations came to my rectory crying and said
[the archdiocese] lied about what he said had happened."

Longtime parishioner Monica Lewers, now Calicott's spokeswoman, said
the youth made another appearance at a Holy Angels mass to apologize after
Calicott was returned to ministry in 1995.

Though Calicott's canon lawyer, Monsignor Kevin Vann, is appealing to
the Vatican on the basis that Calicott had already faced the charges that
led to a second removal under the 2002 charter, one question that remains
unresolved is if Calicott has ever admitted to the accusations.

"That's part of the murkiness of this thing: whether he admitted
it or whether he didn't, whether the accuser accused him and recanted
or whether the accuser accused him and kept it there," said Perry.
"All that is still murky to me."

Since the Dallas charter led to Calicott's removal in 2002, Calicott,
George, and others have praised the effort to protect youths from sexual
abuse, but also questioned the zero-tolerance policy under which the document
requires the removal of any priest credibly accused of sexual abuse in
the past.

The charter appears to fly in the face of longstanding church statutes
of limitation and the reopening of cases adjudicated in the past, said
Monsignor Thomas Green, professor of canon law at Catholic University
in Washington.

Though the Vatican has allowed abuse cases to continue despite the apparent
conflicts, he said, few of the new guidelines have been set on paper.

Little published

"Right now, it's sort of word of mouth. Very little has been published,"
he said. "Unless you have a little clearer sense of what is happening,
you're really in a quandary to figure it out."

That has been the legal backdrop against which Calicott had been returning
to Holy Angels as his appeal continued in Rome.

Holy Angels administrator Rev. Bob Miller said Calicott had frequently
spent the night in the rectory since his suspension in 2002. Under the
early terms of his suspension, Calicott had been permitted to attend mass
at Holy Angels on Sunday, said Dwyer.

But when it was revealed that Calicott had spoken to a health class in
the parish school, George ordered him to "absent himself" entirely
from Holy Angels until his case has been concluded in Rome.

Calicott's stance appears to have complicated an already messy situation
in Chicago, said University of Massachusetts at Amherst religious sociologist
Jay Demerath.